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Wednesday, April 27, 2016

How to think about Islamic State

VIOLENCE has erupted across a broad swath of
territory in recent months: wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, suicide
bombings in Xinjiang, Nigeria and Turkey, insurgencies from Yemen to Thailand,
massacres in Paris, Tunisia and the American south. Future historians may well
see such uncoordinated mayhem as commencing the third — and the longest and the
strangest — of world wars. Certainly, forces larger and more complex than in
the previous two wars are at work; they outrun our capacity to apprehend them,
let alone adjust their direction to our benefit.

The early post cold war consensus — that bourgeois democracy has solved the
riddle of history, and a global capitalist economy will usher in worldwide
prosperity and peace — lies in tatters. But no plausible alternatives of
political and economic organisation are in sight. A world organised for the
play of individual self-interest looks more and more prone to manic tribalism.

In the lengthening spiral of mutinies from Charleston to central India, the
insurgents of Iraq and Syria have monopolised our attention by their swift
military victories; their exhibitionistic brutality, especially towards women
and minorities; and, most significantly, their brisk seduction of young people
from the cities of Europe and the US. Globalisation has everywhere rapidly
weakened older forms of authority, in Europe’s social democracies as well as
Arab despotisms, and thrown up an array of unpredictable new international
actors, from Chinese irredentists and cyberhackers to Syriza and Boko Haram.
But the sudden appearance of Islamic State (Isis) in Mosul last year, and the
continuing failure to stem its expansion or check its appeal, is the clearest
sign of a general perplexity, especially among political elites, who do not
seem to know what they are doing and what they are bringing about.

In its capacity to invade and hold a territory the size of England, to inspire
me-too zealotry in Pakistan, Gaza, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Libya and Egypt, and
to entice thousands of camp followers, Isis represents a quantum leap over all
other private and state-sanctioned cults of violence and authoritarianism
today. But we are not faring well with the cognitive challenge to define this
phenomenon.

For Obama, it is a ‘terrorist organisation, pure and simple’, which ‘we will
degrade and ultimately destroy’. British politicians, yet again hoping against
experience to impress the natives with a show of force, want to bomb the Levant
as well as Mesopotamia. A sensationalist and scruple-free press seems eager to
collude in their ‘noble lie’: that a Middle Eastern militia, thriving on the
utter ineptitude of its local adversaries, poses an ‘existential risk’ to an
island fortress that saw off Napoleon and Hitler. The experts on Islam who
opened for business on 9/11 peddle their wares more feverishly, helped by
clash-of-civilisation theorists and other intellectual robots of the cold war,
which were programmed to think in binaries (us versus them, free versus unfree
world, Islam versus the west) and to limit their lexicon to words such as
‘ideology’, ‘threat’ and ‘generational struggle’. The rash of
pseudo-explanations — Islamism, Islamic extremism, Islamic fundamentalism,
Islamic theology, Islamic irrationalism — makes Islam seem more than ever a
concept in search of some content while normalising hatred and prejudice
against more than 1.5 billion people. The abysmal intellectual deficit is summed
up, on one hand, by the unremorsefully bellicose figure of Blair, and, on the
other, the British government squabbling with the BBC over what to call Isis.

***

IN THE broadest view, Isis seems the product of a catastrophic war — the
Anglo-American assault on Iraq. There is no doubt that the ground for it was
prepared by this systematic devastation — the murder and displacement of
millions, which came after more than a decade of brutalisation by sanctions and
embargoes. The dismantling of the Iraqi army, de-Ba’athification and the
Anglo-American imprimatur to Shia supremacism provoked the formation in
Mesopotamia of al-Qaida, Isis’s precursor. Many local factors converged to make
Isis’s emergence possible last year: vengeful Sunnis; reorganised Ba’athists in
Iraq; the co-dependence of the west on despotic allies (al-Sisi, al-Maliki) and
incoherence over Syria; the cynical manoeuvres of Assad; Turkey’s hubristic
neo-Ottomanism, which seems exceeded in its recklessness only by the actions of
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.

The failure of the Arab Spring has also played a part. Tunisia, its originator,
has sent the largest contingent of foreign jihadis to Iraq and Syria.
Altogether an estimated 17,000 people, mostly young men, from 90 countries have
travelled to Syria and Iraq to offer their services to Isis. Dozens of British
women have gone, despite the fact that men of Isis have enslaved and raped
girls as young as 10 years old, and stipulated that Muslim girls marry between
the ages of nine and 17, and live in total seclusion. ‘You can easily earn
yourself a higher station with God almighty,’ a Canadian insurrectionist, Andre
Poulin, exhorted in a video used by Isis for online recruitment, ‘by
sacrificing just a small bit of this worldly life.’

It is not hard to see that populous countries such as Pakistan and Indonesia
will always have a significant number of takers for well-paid martyrdom. What
explains, however, the allure of a caliphate among thousands of residents of
relatively prosperous and stable countries, such as the high-achieving London
schoolgirls who travelled to Syria this spring?

Isis, the military phenomenon, could conceivably be degraded and destroyed. Or,
it could rise further, fall abruptly and then rise again (like al-Qaida, which
has been degraded and destroyed several times in recent years). The state can
use its immense power to impound passports, shut down websites, and even
enforce indoctrination in ‘British values’ in schools. But this is no way to
stem what seems a worldwide outbreak of intellectual and moral secessionism.

Isis is only one of its many beneficiaries; demagogues of all kinds have tapped
the simmering reservoirs of cynicism and discontent. At the very least, their
growing success and influence ought to make us re-examine our basic assumptions
of order and continuity since the political and scientific revolutions of the
19th century – our belief that the human goods achieved so far by a fortunate
minority can be realised by the ever-growing majority that desires them. We
must ask if the millions of young people awakening around the world to their
inheritance can realise the modern promise of freedom and prosperity. Or, are
they doomed to lurch, like many others in the past, between a sense of
inadequacy and fantasies of revenge?

***

RETURNING to Russia from Europe in 1862, Dostoevsky first began to explore at
length the very modern torment of ressentiment that the misogynists of Twitter
today manifest as much as the dupes of Isis. Russian writers from Pushkin
onwards had already probed the peculiar psychology of the ‘superfluous’ man in
a semi-westernised society: educated into a sense of hope and entitlement, but
rendered adrift by his limited circumstances, and exposed to feelings of
weakness, inferiority and envy. Russia, trying to catch up with the west,
produced many such spiritually unmoored young men who had a quasi-Byronic
conception of freedom, further inflated by German idealism, but the most
unpromising conditions in which to realise them.

Rudin in Turgenev’s eponymous novel desperately wants to surrender himself
‘completely, greedily, utterly’ to something; he ends up dead on a Parisian
barricade in 1848, having sacrificed himself to a cause he doesn’t fully
believe in. It was, however, Dostoevsky who saw most acutely how individuals,
trained to believe in a lofty notion of personal freedom and sovereignty, and
then confronted with a reality that cruelly cancelled it, could break out of
paralysing ambivalence into gratuitous murder and paranoid insurgency.

His insight into this fateful gap between the theory and practice of liberal
individualism developed during his travels in western Europe — the original
site of the greatest social, political and economic transformations in human
history, and the exemplar with its ideal of individual freedom for all of
humanity. By the mid-19th century, Britain was the paradigmatic modern state
and society, with its sights firmly set on industrial prosperity and commercial
expansion. Visiting London in 1862, Dostoevsky quickly realised the
world-historical import of what he was witnessing. ‘You become aware of a
colossal idea,’ he wrote after visiting the International Exhibition, showcase
of an all-conquering material culture: ‘You sense that it would require great
and everlasting spiritual denial and fortitude in order not to submit, not to
capitulate before the impression, not to bow to what is, and not to deify Baal,
that is, not to accept the material world as your ideal.’

However, as Dostoevsky saw it, the cost of such splendour and magnificence was
a society dominated by the war of all against all, in which most people were
condemned to be losers. In Paris, he caustically noted that liberté existed
only for the millionaire. The notion of equality before the law was a ‘personal
insult’ to the poor exposed to French justice. As for fraternité, it was
another hoax in a society driven by the ‘individualist, isolationist instinct’
and the lust for private property.

Dostoevsky diagnosed the new project of human emancipation through the
bewilderment and bitterness of people coming late to the modern world, and
hoping to use its evidently successful ideas and methods to their advantage.
For these naive latecomers, the gap between the noble ends of individual
liberation and the poverty of available means in their barbarous social order
was the greatest. The self-loathing clerk in Notes from Underground represents
the human being who is excruciatingly aware that free moral choice is
impossible in a world increasingly regimented by instrumental reason. He dreams
constantly and impotently of revenge against his social superiors. Raskolnikov,
the deracinated former law student in Crime and Punishment, is the psychopath
of instrumental rationality, who can work up evidently logical reasons to do
anything he desires. After murdering an old woman, he derives philosophical
validation from the most celebrated nationalist and imperialist of his time,
Napoleon: a ‘true master, to whom everything is permitted’.

***

THE bloody dramas of political and economic laggards can seem remote from
liberal-democratic Britain. The early and decisive winner in the sweepstakes of
modern history has guaranteed an admirable measure of security, stability and
dignity to many of its citizens. The parochial vision of modern history as
essentially a conflict between open society and its enemies (liberal democracy
versus nazism, communism and Islam) can feel accurate within the unbreached
perimeters of Britain (and the US). It is not untrue to assert that Britain’s
innovations and global reach spread the light of reason to the remotest corners
of the Earth. Britain made the modern world in the sense that the forces it
helped to originate — technology, economic organisation and science — formed a
maelstrom that is still overwhelming millions of lives.

But this is also why Britain’s achievements cannot be seen in isolation from
their ambiguous consequences elsewhere. Blaming Islamic theology, or fixating
on the repellent rhetoric of Isis, may be indispensable in achieving moral
self-entrancement, and toughening up convictions of superiority: we, liberal,
democratic and rational, are not at all like these savages. But these
spine-stiffening exercises can’t obscure the fact that Britain’s history has
long been continuous with the world it made, which includes its ostensible
enemies in Europe and beyond. Regardless of what the ‘island story’ says, the
belief systems and institutions Britain initiated — a global market economy,
the nation state, utilitarian rationality — first caused a long emergency in
Europe, before roiling the older worlds of Asia and Africa.

The recurrent crises explain why a range of figures, from Blake to Gandhi, and
Simone Weil to Yukio Mishima, reacted remarkably similarly to the advent of
industrial and commercial society, to the unprecedented phenomenon of all that
is solid melting into thin air, across Europe, Asia and Africa.

‘Spectres reign where no gods are,’ Schiller wrote, deploring the atrophying of
the ‘sacral sense’ into nationalism and political power. Fear of moral and
spiritual diminishment, and social chaos, was also a commonplace of much
19th-century British writing. ‘The rich have become richer, and the poor have
become poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven between the Scylla and
Charybdis of anarchy and despotism,’ Shelley wrote in 1821, blaming inequality
and disorder on the ‘unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty’.
Coleridge, denouncing ‘a contemptible democratical oligarchy of glib
economists’, asked: ‘Is the increasing number of wealthy individuals that which
ought to be understood by the wealth of the nation?’ Dickens did much with
Carlyle’s despairing insight into cash payment as the ‘sole nexus’ between
human beings. DH Lawrence recoiled fruitfully from ‘the base forcing of all
human energy into a competition of mere acquisition’. Proximity to British
arguments helped shape Marx’s vision of a proletariat goaded by the inequities
and degradations of industrial capitalism into a revolutionary redemption of
human existence.

The actual revolutions and revolts, however, occurred outside Britain, where
liberal individualism, the product of a settled society with fixed social
structures, seemed to have no answers to the plight of the uprooted masses
living in squalor in cities. Its failure first motivated cultural nationalists,
socialists, anarchists and revolutionaries across Europe, before seeding many
anti-colonial movements in Asia and Africa. In an irony of modern history,
which stalks revolutions and revolts to this day, the search for a new moral
community has constantly assumed unpredicted and vicious forms. But then the
dislocations and traumas caused by industralisation and urbanisation
accelerated the growth of ideologies of race and blood in even enlightened
western Europe.

***

‘THE way of modern culture,’ the Austrian writer Franz Grillparzer once
lamented, ‘leads from humanity through nationality to bestiality.’ He died too
early (1872) to see another landmark en route to barbarism: modern European
imperialism, whose humanitarian rhetoric was, like one of its representatives,
Conrad’s Kurtz, ‘hollow at the core’.

In Asia, the usual disruptions of an industrial and commercial system that
transcends political frontiers and destroys economic self-sufficiency,
enslaving individuals to impersonal forces, were accompanied by a racist
imperialism. The early victims and opponents of this ultra-aggressive modernity
were local elites who organised their resistance around traditionalist
loyalties and fantasies of recapturing a lost golden age — tendencies evident
in the Boxer Rebellion in China as well as early 19th-century jihads against
British rule in India.

Premodern political chieftains, who were long ago supplanted by
western-educated men and women quoting John Stuart Mill and demanding
individual rights, do not and cannot exist any more, however ‘Islamic’ their
theology may seem. They return today as parody — and there is much that is
purely camp about a self-appointed caliph sporting a Rolex and India’s Hindu
revivalist prime minister draped in a Savile Row $15,000 suit with personalised
pin stripes. The spread of literacy, improved communications, rising
populations and urbanisation have transformed the remotest corners of Asia and
Africa. The desire for self-expansion through material success fully dominates
the extant spiritual ideals of traditional religions and cultures.

Isis desperately tries to reinvent the early ideological antagonism between the
imperialistic modern west and its traditionalist enemies. A recent issue of
their magazine Dabiq approvingly quotes George W Bush’s us-versus-them
exhortation, insisting that there is no ‘Grey Zone’ in the holy war. Craving
intellectual and political prestige, the DIY jihadists receive helpful
endorsements from the self-proclaimed paladins of the west, such as Michael
Gove, Britain’s leading American-style neocon. Responding to the revelation on
17 July of secret British bombing of Syria, Gove asserted that the ‘need to
maintain the strength and durability of the western alliance in the face of
Islamist fundamentalism’ can ‘trump everything’.

Clashing in the night, the ignorant armies of ideologues endow each other’s
cherished self-conceptions with the veracity they crave. But their
self-flattering oppositions collapse once we recognise that much violence today
arises out of a heightened and continuously thwarted desire for convergence and
resemblance rather than religious, cultural and theological difference.

The advent of the global economy in the 19th century, and its empowerment of a
small island, caused an explosion of mimetic desire from western Europe to
Japan. Since then, a sense of impotence and compensatory cultural pride has
routinely driven the weak and marginalised to attack those that seem stronger
than them while secretly desiring to possess their advantages. Humiliated rage
and furtive envy characterise Muslim insurrectionaries and Hindu fanatics today
as much as they did the militarist Japanese insisting on their unique spiritual
quintessence. It is certainly not some esoteric 13th-century Hadith that makes
Isis so eager to adopt the modern west’s technologies of war, revolution and
propaganda — especially, as the homicidal dandyism of Jihadi John reveals, its
mediatised shock-and-awe violence.

There is nothing remarkable about the fact that the biggest horde of foreign
fighters in Iraq and Syria originated in Tunisia, the most westernised of Arab
countries. Mass education, economic crisis and unfeeling government have long
constituted a fertile soil for the cults of authoritarianism and violence.
Powerlessness and deprivation are exacerbated today by the ability, boosted by
digital media, to constantly compare your life with the lives of the fortunate
(especially women entering the workforce or prominent in the public sphere: a
common source of rage for men with siege mentalities worldwide). The quotient
of frustration tends to be highest in countries that have a large population of
educated young men who have undergone multiple shocks and displacements in
their transition to modernity and yet find themselves unable to fulfil the
promise of self-empowerment. For many of them the contradiction Dostoevsky
noticed between extravagant promise and meagre means has become intolerable.

***

THE sacral sense — the traditional basis of religion, entailing humility and
self-restraint — has atrophied even where the churches, mosques and temples are
full. The spectres of power reign incontestably where no gods are. Their
triumph makes nonsense of the medieval-modern axis on which jihadis preening on
Instagram in Halloween costumes are still reflexively defined. So extensive is
the rout of pre-modern spiritual and metaphysical traditions that it is hard to
even imagine their resurrection, let alone the restoration, on a necessarily
large scale, of a non-instrumental view of human life (and the much-despoiled
natural world). But there seem to be no political escape routes, either, out of
the grisly cycle of retributive bombing and beheading.

The choice for many people in the early 20th century, as Rosa Luxemburg
famously proclaimed, was between socialism and barbarism. The German thinker
spoke as the historical drama of the 19th century — revolution, nationalism,
state-building, economic expansion, arms races, imperial aggrandisement — reached
a disastrous denouement in the first world war. The choice has seemed less
clear in the century since.

The mimic imperialisms of Japan and Germany, two resentful late-modernisers in
Britain’s shadow, played out on a catastrophic scale the conflict built into
the capitalist order. But socialist states committed to building human
societies on co-operation rather than rivalry produced their own grotesqueries,
as manifested by Stalin and Mao and numerous regimes in the colonised world
that sought moral advantage over their western masters by aiming at equality as
well as prosperity.

Since 1989, the energies of postcolonial idealism have faded together with
socialism as an economic and moral alternative. The unfettered globalisation of
capital annexed more parts of the world into a uniform pattern of desire and
consumption. The democratic revolution of aspiration De Tocqueville witnessed
in the early 19th century swept across the world, sparking longings for wealth,
status and power in the most unpromising circumstances. Equality of conditions,
in which talent, education and hard work are rewarded by individual mobility,
ceased to be an exclusively American illusion after 1989. It proliferated even
as structural inequality entrenches itself further.

In the neoliberal fantasy of individualism, everyone was supposed to be an
entrepreneur, retraining and repackaging themselves in a dynamic economy,
perpetually alert to the latter’s technological revolutions. But capital
continually moves across national boundaries in the search for profit,
contemptuously sweeping skills and norms made obsolete by technology into the
dustbin of history; and defeat and humiliation have become commonplace
experiences in the strenuous endeavour of franchising the individual self.

Significantly numerous members of the precariat realise today that there is no
such thing as a level playing field. The number of superfluous young people
condemned to the anteroom of the modern world, an expanded Calais in its
squalor and hopelessness, has grown exponentially in recent decades, especially
in Asia and Africa’s youthful societies. The appeal of formal and informal
secession — the possibility, broadly, of greater control over your life — has
grown from Scotland to Hong Kong, beyond the cunningly separatist elites with
multiple citizenship and offshore accounts. More and more people feel the gap
between the profligate promises of individual freedom and sovereignty, and the
incapacity of their political and economic organisations to realise them.

Even the nation state expressly designed to fulfil those promises — the United
States — seethes with angry disillusionment across its class and racial
divisions. A sense of victimhood festers among even relatively advantaged white
men, as the rancorously popular candidacy of Donald Trump confirms. Elsewhere,
the nasty discovery of Atticus Finch as a segregationist compounds the shock of
Ferguson and Baltimore. Coming after decades of relentless and now
insurmountable inequality, the revelation of long-standing systemic violence
against African Americans is challenging some primary national myths and
pieties. In a democracy founded by wealthy slave-owners and settler
colonialists, and hollowed out by plutocrats, many citizens turn out to have
never enjoyed equality of conditions. They raise the question that cuts through
decades of liberal evasiveness about the cruelties of a political system
intended to facilitate private moneymaking: ‘how to erect,’ as Ta-Nehisi Coates
puts it in his searing new book, Between the World and Me, ‘a democracy
independent of cannibalism?’

And yet the obvious moral flaws of capitalism have not made it politically
vulnerable. In the west, a common and effective response among regnant elites
to unravelling national narratives and loss of legitimacy is fear-mongering
among minorities and immigrants — an insidious campaign that continuously feeds
on the hostility it provokes. These cosseted beneficiaries of an iniquitous
order are also quick to ostracise the stray dissenter among them, as the case
of Greece reveals. Chinese, Russian, Turkish and Indian leaders, who are also
productively refurbishing their nation-building ideologies, have even less
reason to oppose a global economic system that has helped enrich them and their
cronies and allies.

Rather, Xi Jinping, Modi, Putin and Erdogan follow in the line of European and
Japanese demagogues who responded to the many crises of capitalism by exhorting
unity before internal and external threats. European or American-style
imperialism is not a feasible option for them yet; they deploy instead, more
riskily, jingoistic nationalism and cross-border militarism as a valve for
domestic tensions. They have also retrofitted old-style nationalism for their
growing populations of uprooted citizens, who harbour yearnings for belonging
and community as well as material plenitude. Their self-legitimising narratives
are necessarily hybrid: Mao-plus-Confucius, Holy Cow-plus-Smart Cities,
Neoliberalism-plus-Islam, Putinism-plus-Orthodox Christianity.

***

ISIS, too, offers a postmodern collage rather than a determinate creed. Born in
the ruins of two nation states that dissolved in sectarian violence, it vends
the fantasy of a morally untainted and transnational caliphate. In actuality,
Isis is the canniest of all traders in the flourishing international economy of
disaffection: the most resourceful among all those who offer the security of
collective identity to isolated and fearful individuals. It promises, along
with others who retail racial, national and religious supremacy, to release the
anxiety and frustrations of the private life into the violence of the global.
Unlike its rivals, however, Isis mobilises ressentiment into militant rebellion
against the status quo.

Isis mocks the entrepreneurial age’s imperative to project an appealing
personality by posting snuff videos on social media. At the same time, it has a
stern bureaucracy devoted to proper sanitation and tax collection. Some members
of Isis extol the spiritual nobility of the Prophet and the earliest caliphs.
Others confess through their mass rapes, choreographed murders and rational
self-justifications a primary fealty to nihilism: that characteristically
modern-day and insidiously common doctrine that makes it impossible for
modern-day Raskolnikovs to deny themselves anything, and possible to justify
anything.

The shapeshifting aspect of Isis is hardly unusual in a world in which
‘liberals’ morph into warmongers, and ‘conservatives’ institute revolutionary
free-market ‘reforms’. Meanwhile, technocrats, while slashing employment and
welfare benefits, and immiserating entire societies and generations, propose to
bomb refugee boats, and secure unprecedented powers to imprison and snoop.

You can of course continue to insist on the rationality of liberal democracy as
against ‘Islamic irrationalism’ while waging infinite wars abroad and
assaulting civil liberties at home. Such a conception of liberalism and
democracy, however, will not only reveal its inability to offer wise
representation to citizens. It will also make freshly relevant the question
about intellectual and moral legitimacy raised by TS Eliot at a dark time in
1938, when he asked if ‘our society, which had always been so assured of its
superiority and rectitude, so confident of its unexamined premises’ was
‘assembled round anything more permanent than a congeries of banks, insurance
companies and industries, and had it any beliefs more essential than a belief
in compound interest and the maintenance of dividends?’

Today, the unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty looks more
indifferent to ordinary lives, and their need for belief and enchantment. The
political impasses and economic shocks in our societies, and the irreparably
damaged environment, corroborate the bleakest views of 19th-century critics who
condemned modern capitalism as a heartless machinery for economic growth, or
the enrichment of the few, which works against such fundamentally human
aspirations as stability, community and a better future. Isis, among many
others, draws its appeal from an incoherence of concepts — ‘democracy’ and
‘individual rights’ among them — with which many still reflexively shore up the
ideological defences of a self-evidently dysfunctional system. The
contradictions and costs of a tiny minority’s progress, long suppressed by
blustery denial and aggressive equivocation, have become visible on a planetary
scale. They encourage the suspicion — potentially lethal among the hundreds of
millions of young people condemned to being superfluous — that the present
order, democratic or authoritarian, is built on force and fraud; they incite a
broader and more volatile apocalyptic and nihilistic mood than we have
witnessed before. Professional politicians, and their intellectual menials,
will no doubt blather on about ‘Islamic fundamentalism’, the ‘western alliance’
and ‘full-spectrum response’. Much radical thinking, however, is required if we
are to prevent ressentiment from erupting into even bigger conflagrations.